Author: Phil

I am happy for India that it has reached the stage of technical and economic development where it can launch an unmanned mission to the moon, lead international story on the BBC Today programme this morning.

Apparently its called Chandrayaan 1.

At the same time a part of our government, the Department for International Development (DFID), is sending £100 millions to India in development aid. The time has come to leave nuclear armed, militarily resurgent, space racing India to fund its own social programmes. DFID say:

DFID has provided about £1,045 million to India in bilateral aid over the past five years. Between 2008 and 2011 the UK will provide £825 million in aid to India.

If you look into what DFID is doing with this cash you have to agree that the money is well spent. You have to ask why it is not Indian government money. If India wants to prioritise military-industrial projects over social ones then that is a matter for them. Enough.

I haven’t been blogging much lately. It is hard to get fired up about writing about local issues, even London issues, when it seems like our whole economy is in freefall. Today I might have written about TfL’s trial of live CCTV on the buses but I just didn’t have the heart really. As I wrote back at the end of last month “we are going through a worrying, albeit temporary, crisis”. It looks like temporary is going to be the rest of this year and most of next year.

Today National Statistics published the debt figures for September.

As the BBC reported today borrowing is at a post war high. Remember that is at the end of the longest boom in modern history and at the start of our biggest financial crisis certainly since the early 1970s and probably since the 1930s.

Even today of all days our pernicious, lying prime minister cannot tell it straight. Watch this exchange in Parliament today. At 2:39 the prime minister says, without qualification, that “it is because we cut the national debt over the last few years”. If you look at the figures released today, the PSF8 table at the back, you will see that net government debt was £351 billion in May 1997 and is £645 billion today, pretty much double in nominal terms. As a proportion of GDP net debt was 42.5% in May 1997. Today it is 43.4%. Now whilst this is not much worse than May 1997 it is worse not better so Brown was lying point blank and in any case you would normally have to hope for an improvement after a continuous period of growth.

No doubt Labour’s apologists would point out that without Northern Rock that net debt as a proportion of GDP would be 37.9%, still lower than the ratio when Labour came to power. That is to ignore 11.5 years of growth since then and the fact that it was Brown’s regulatory regime that left the government holding the Rock baby.

The BBC Today programme’s biggest UK story first thing this morning was headlined “Knife sentencing ‘not effective'”.

Apparently Nicola Marfleet, the govenor of Pentonville Prison, interviewed teens on behalf of the Howard League for Penal Reform who had been excluded from school or were serving time in custody.
Most believed tough sentences (up to a maximum of four years) were only meant to “scare” them and they were more likely to be tagged than jailed. The BBC has used this statement of the obvious to produce a headline that cannot be substantiated with the facts.

Kids are not dumb. They talk to each other in playgrounds and they are accurately reporting actual criminal justice system outcomes rather than Labour spin on sentencing. The most up to-date Home Office figures showed that even when the maximum sentence for carrying was only 3 years only about one fifth of all offenders got ANY custodial sentence at all – the vast majority got tagged or some such. The kids are bang on the money.

It is not the sentences that are at fault it is the criminal justice system that systematically fails to do the people’s will. If one kid in a neighbourhood school got four years for carrying you could guarantee that the schoolyard grapevine would broadcast this message very clearly to local schools very quickly. The message currently being broadcast is that you will not get banged up for carrying.

I was struck by Will Self’s hand-wringing in today’s Evening Standard over sending his child to a private school. He follows in the footsteps of a long line of Labour figures who think that the bog standard comprehensive should provide an education for all but their own little darlings. He says he is not a hypocrite:

No, I don’t feel hypocritical just angry. Angry that after more than seven fat years, London schools are in a worse state than ever, angry that those who have not must bear the brunt of it.

At least he has gained the insight that Gordon Brown’s nice decade spending splurge has achieved rather less than advertised.

Old leftie Self is more in line with Gordon Brown’s thinking than he imagines though. In his 2006 budget speech Brown said:

We know the educational benefits of more individual attention, small group teaching and tutoring, and that they are easier to get where the overall teacher pupil ratio is low.

In private schools there is one teacher for every nine pupils compared with one teacher for every sixteen in state secondary schools.

To secure better school results we have improved the pupil teacher ratio and doubled the money spent per year for the typical pupil from £2,500 to £5,000.

But this figure of £5,000 per pupil still stands in marked contrast to average spending per pupil in the private sector of £8,000 a year.

Our long-term aim should be to ensure for 100% of our children the educational support now available to just 10%.

So to improve pupil teacher ratios and the quality of our education, we should agree an objective for our country that stage by stage, adjusting for inflation, we raise average investment per pupil to today’s private school level.

So Brown wants everyone to have the equivalent of a private education provided by the state so Self is not a hypocrite he is merely jumping the queue.

This is one of the dumber things that Brown ever said.

Firstly, he was comparing a private sector that on the whole consciously provides a premium service with a free system for all. If we had universal private education there would be a whole class of “bog standard” private schools that would provide excellent education for a modest sum. This is what Chris Woodhead, controversial ex-Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools, is trying to achieve with Cognita Schools. See also Telegraph article here.

Secondly, with the credit crisis in full effect this goal, unrealistic at the best of times, looks further off.

Thirdly, and finally, as soon as the state ends up spending equivalent amounts to the private sector directly on each child then most parents will scream “give me that cash to spend in the private sector”. This is effectively what the Conservatives are offering.

I couldn’t stay in Birmingham for the leader’s speech this afternoon as I had to get back to London for work this morning.

I did though get the chance to watch the whole thing on BBC Parliament. It was a long speech but I was enthralled by it. I have not always been a total Cameroon but I loved the way he knitted the past with the future and managed to weave a fabric that encompassed so many issues.

One thing that struck me particularly were two items that are straight lifts from Boris’ London campaign. One was the reference to incivility and the other was the incidence of teen crime. I reproduce two snippets below:

But it’s not just the crime; not even the anti-social behaviour. It’s the angry, harsh culture of incivility that seems to be all around us. When in one generation we seem to have abandoned the habits of all human history that in a civilised society, adults have a proper role – a responsibility – to uphold rules and order in the public realm not just for their own children but for other people’s too.

Just consider the senseless, barbaric violence on our streets. Children killing children. Twenty-seven kids murdered on the streets of London this year.

They worked for Boris. I am sure they will work for Cameron too.